July 30, 2016

National Review: “One of the reasons corruption is so hard to eliminate, particularly in the developing world, is that honesty is seen as a kind of betrayal. Bribe-takers like bribes, to be sure, but they also hate those who won’t take them — not just because the refusers threaten their livelihoods, but because such refusals remind the corrupted of that they had a choice.”

July 19, 2016

Quote: “Once a nation acknowledges publicly that it is corrupt (as in national elections), that its people care only for what they can put in their pocket or stuff into their mouths, something terrible can happen.

There is a weakening. A listlessness, a nihilism, where personal appetites and longings for celebrity outweigh what was once understood as common virtue. And what comes next, inevitably, is a fall, and the frightened citizens rally around a strong and brutal personality who offers them muscular leadership. And what they once had is gone.

If you read histories about great empires and how they lost their way — slowly, inexorably, the illness growing along the dull spine of what they once had been — then you already know what happens.

And if you don’t read history, it really doesn’t matter. Just watch some more TV or tweet something, have a drink and enjoy yourselves.”

July 15, 2016

Quoth: “It is a measure of the corruption of the Democratic party and its ability to inspire corruption in others that John Lewis, once a civil-rights leader, is today leading a movement to strip Americans of their civil rights based on secret lists of subversives compiled by police agencies and the military. Perhaps it has not occurred to Representative Lewis that his mentor, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., also was on a secret government list, as indeed was Lewis himself under the watchful eye of J. Edgar Hoover.

The Democrats demand that Americans be stripped of their Second Amendment rights with no attention paid to the Fifth Amendment, to due process. They propose that Americans be stripped of their legal protections under the Bill of Rights even when they have not been charged with, much less convicted of, a crime. They propose that this be done on the basis of a series of secret government lists, whose contents, criteria, and keepers are treated as state secrets.

You cannot call yourself a ‘liberal’ and endorse that. You cannot call yourself a ‘liberal’ and endure that.”

July 14, 2016

“My vote doesn’t belong to the GOP. It is not theirs to lose. They don’t have a presumptive claim to it, as if it starts in their column by right and declining to give it to them requires justification. My vote is mine, and they must earn it by giving me good reasons to believe they are best qualified to govern. I refuse to honor the party of Trump with such recognition.

Not voting for Trump isn’t the same as voting for Clinton, unless I vote for Clinton, which I will not do. Not voting for Trump is a morally meaningful act. It means I can look myself in the mirror, sleep soundly at night, and look my children in the eye with dignity and self-respect.

It means that if and when the country is ready to welcome a new political movement of limited government and human dignity, a few—like Sasse—will be standing ready, unsullied by the catastrophe unfolding around us, ready to replace the nihilist apparatchiks who tried to buy a few more years in power by shilling for a neo-fascist.

This is a morally clarifying moment. Trumpism is unjust, foolish, and un-American. It was wrong before May 4, and it is wrong today. It is appalling—it is obscene—that a political party rooted in civic responsibility, limited government, and ordered liberty has so quickly embraced a strongman demagogue.”

July 9, 2016

Not my feet, actually. R2’s feet. When I look back on the 5ish years that I’ll spend doing this crazy project I believe that “Tig Welding the Feet” will probably be one of the hardest parts. I have spent 77 hours practicing TIG and used almost 500 feet of welding rod. Not sure what that translates to in actual weld length since there’s not a 1:1 relationship between rods and weld beads laid down, but it has got to be close to 1000 feet. In the last week I’ve spent nearly 15 hours under the hood welding parts. And, oh, what parts.

I’m currently working on the foot shell assemblies. These:

There are two outer feet (the top picture) and one center foot (bottom pic). All aluminum. The side details are applied later, as are the vertical strips on the ends, but the rows of rectangles around the bottom skirt are part of the assembly.

So far it has taken 13 hours to weld up the center foot and it looks great. I ground it down (2 hours) and noticed that some of my welds hadn’t penetrated enough, so I had to go back and re-weld everything. I really hope that I did it right. Grinding isn’t fun.

The side feet (the top pic above) has been a real bear. Everything wants to warp and crack and the shape is just a crazy one to start with with a 3″ diameter curve and a delicate little edge on the backside (of this pic). Several times I found myself wanting to slap whoever designed this part. The curved edge in particular has been it’s own special joy. I tried to bend the part using a hydraulic press but just couldn’t get it to fit correctly, which meant that I had to toss the part and start over. This time I spent 13 hours milling the curve on the manual mill, as well as the bottom corner piece. Then when I welded it all up the pieces warped so badly that I had an air gap, so I had to grind most of the corner bit (which I had gotten accurate to .004″) so that I could weld in a patch.

This frustrating part has been bedeviling me for several weeks now, but I think I see a light at the end of the tunnel. I spent 11 hours at TechShop today (I had a 4 hour water jet class in the middle) doing nothing but welding. I still have to grind, but here’s what I did:

It’s upside-down in this picture since I weld better right-to-left and that top weld was the last one I did. There was a point tonight around hour 5 where I felt like I clicked up to the next level. My coordination with the pedal, rod, and torch was much better, I was able to direct heat into tiny little areas without melting nearby edges or corners, and, most importantly, I even bridged a 1/4″ gap and created new metal to do it. That’s pretty advanced. Basically, even with my patch I still had a couple of spots that gapped. I had resigned myself to using lab metal to fill them in. However, I was welding so well that when I got to that spot I just said screw it and dove right in. In hindsight I could have really messed things up but I guess I was feeling confident. Well, I absolutely nailed it, adding in several cubic centimeters of new metal by pushing the rod into the puddle before it had a chance to drip or ooze away. I nearly whooped for joy! You can see the spot where I did that in the above pic. It’s the upside down corner nearest the camera where the curve meets the edge. I did a similar spot on the back side and got that as well. BOOM!

Once this piece is ground down (a long and messy job) I’m sure there will be a few spots that I’ll have to go back and patch up. Then I’ll have to grind it down again to finish the part. These feet have been a struggle at every point and I consider it one of the hardest and most satisfying things I’ve ever done from a maker/builder standpoint. I still have one more foot to go (ugh!) and it’ll be a month or two before they’re all ground down, rewelded, and reground. I’ll post pics then.

In the meantime, here’s a picture of the whole leg stack coming together. I ground the welds on the main leg box and it looks like one solid piece! That’s what the rest of them will look like once I’m done. This pic has the leg assembly, horseshoe, ankle, battery box, and foot shell. I stacked this together tonight and nearly cried. 🙂

July 5, 2016

“To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.”

July 2, 2016

“My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.”